EU’S EASTERN DIPLOMACY NEEDS TAILORING
Tony Barber in Brussels

FT
May 3 2009 18:43

One of the European Union’s great strengths is its ability, as a
prosperous, democratic community of like-minded states, to export
political and economic stability to its neighbours. This strength
will be put to the test on Thursday when the EU launches its "Eastern
Partnership", an initiative to forge closer ties with six ex-Soviet
states between the bloc’s eastern border and Russia.

The Eastern Partnership, conceived by Poland and Sweden in 2007, covers
Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. It is an
improvement on the EU’s redundant "European Neighbourhood Policy",
a 2004 project that absurdly grouped eastern European neighbours with
places such as Libya, Syria and the Palestinian Authority.

Russia, the ghost at the feast, poses another problem. All six
ex-Soviet states were under the Kremlin’s thumb for most of the 20th
century. No sooner had the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 than foreign
policy theorists in Moscow dubbed the area Russia’s "near abroad".

Read Tony Barber’s blog for more on the EU’s economic and foreign
policies In the age of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s
prime minister and president, the preferred concept is that of a
"privileged sphere of influence". In other words, Ru ssia, like a
Siberian guard dog, sees the Eastern Partnership as an attempt by
some 27-headed terrier to encroach on its patch.

A third issue concerns what is on offer for the six eastern states. On
the face of things, it is not money. Under current proposals, the
programme will raise EU assistance to the region to a meagre â~B¬600m
($796m, £534m) from a previously agreed â~B¬250m in 2010-2013.

However, this criticism is misplaced. Through the International
Monetary Fund, the EU is helping to arrange emergency loans for
countries such as Armenia, Belarus and Ukraine to survive the global
financial crisis and recession. From the recipients’ point of view,
of course, this may reinforce the perception that the IMF, not the
Eastern Partnership, is where the action is.

Far more damaging to the EU’s image in the six states are the bloc’s
travel policies – what Tomas Valasek, an analyst at the London-based
Centre for European Reform think-tank, calls "the expensive and
gratuitously complicated visa application process". When the European
Commission suggested in December that EU governments should set the
goal of removing all visa requirements, howls of protest came from
Germany and other western European countries.

As a result, EU leaders quietly dropped the idea of visa-free travel
at a summit in March. They replaced it with an almost meaningless
offer of simplified visa pr ocedures, to be applied on a case-by-case
basis and as a long-term goal.

The Germans and others take the view that it is inconceivable to
extend visa-free travel to countries such as Ukraine or Moldova as
long as they are significant sources of prostitution, drug traffickers
and illegal workers and migrants. This attitude offends Belarus,
which believes that it has a good record on suppressing illegal
migration. "We’re not a problem – we’re part of the solution," says
Sergei Martynov, Belarus’s foreign minister.

One alleged weakness of this partnership is that it makes no promises
– even vague promises – that the six states will one day be welcome
to join the EU. It is a tempting argument, but there is a risk of
over-simplification.

For example, Ukraine sees its future clearly in the EU, but the
governments of Azerbaijan or Belarus do not. True, it is not difficult
to imagine that, under less authoritarian and pro-Russian leaderships,
Belarus and Moldova may wish to consider joining the EU. But Armenia
may not.

For its part, Georgia may aspire to membership, but it would be a
perilous option for the EU, with Russia now in effective occupation
of two separatist regions of Georgia – Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Each of the six states presents distinctive challenges. The best
course for the EU is to draw them all as close as possible by means
of20free trade and visa-free travel, and – in the sole case of Ukraine
– to make an explicit promise of eventual EU membership.